NASA has just announced that a photo taken by the Phoenix lander of the ground under it may show patches of ice! You can see in the image below the shiny patches where the overlying soil was blown away when Phoenix landed. That shiny stuff may be rock, but it looks a lot like ice.

“We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for Phoenix. “The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.”

In the meantime, if you’ve got an LCD monitor with 1680 x 1050 resolution, check out this wallpaper I colorized of the image from Phoenix.

Back in 1978, JPL scientists were puzzling over some photos sent by the Mars Viking Lander:

Analysis of three component color pictures taken by the Viking lander camera on Mars has established color differences for the background material, the rocks and spots on the rocks. Changes in the location of greenish rock patches and ground patterns have been observed over time. A combination of wind movement of dust and dirt dropped by sampler arm operations could have produced the slight changes in pattern and position. However, the observed patches, patterns and changes could also be attributable to biological activity. Analysis of six component color data on the same scene confirms the observations including the greenish color of the rock patches. [My emphasis]

The report was unable to say for sure what the greenish patches were, but they tried in some ingenious ways to verify that what Viking was sending actually was the color green. Obviously they weren’t able to conclude that the patches were some form of life or we wouldn’t still be looking.

That said, take a look at this portion of an image from the Phoenix Mars Lander just released yesterday by NASA:

Looks green to me. Bear in mind that the images were taken using infrared and violet filters, the staff at JPL had to process images from Phoenix, inferring “from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter,” to create the colors you see, so the green could still be a mistake.

But if it isn’t a mistake, what could it be? Debris kicked up by Phoenix’s landing should be reddish, not green, anyway you don’t see any green in a similar image from the Mars Spirit Rover.

Since NASA sent Phoenix to Vastitas Borealis, the arctic plains of the Martian North Pole, to investigate “whether the site could once have supported microbial life on Mars", they must hope to detect life in some form. I’m guessing they don’t expect it to be complex forms like lichen, but it could happen.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’ve got an LCD monitor with 1680 x 1050 resolution, check out this wallpaper I made of colorized images from Phoenix.

Update: I’m still looking into this. I found this article about Spirit Mars Rover having photographed some shiny green rocks that turned out to be Olivine, but the Phoenix pic doesn’t look much like the description of Olivine.

Update: Found this image taken by Mars Spirit when it explored Gusev Crater. The bluish-green rocks in Gusev may be similar to what Phoenix photographed, in which case it’s probably not some form of life. Still can’t say for sure though, as the Phoenix image shows the green arranged in clumps of very small somethings mixed in with the stones, unlike the Gusev Crater photo where the greenish stones are scattered about.

 

phoenix mars lander

 

After years of controversy, at last we’ve got incontrovertable proof of manmade Global Warming!

Errors introduced into data being added to the GISS surface temperature database for the U.S. ended up increasing temperatures in the U.S. by about 0.15 °C (0.27 °F) over the last 20 years. The mistakes, named “Hansen’s Y2K error” after NASA’s Dr. James Hansen (Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, science advisor to Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and contributor to Clinton/Gore, and Kerry/Edwards presidential campaigns), were very convenient for the warming advocates, but at present appear to have been caused by human error that simply went undetected for years. As to why the error’s named after Hansen, the reasons are many and varied, but you can start here for a quick primer.

Well, last week Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit blogged that he had found and the corrected the errors. As a result of McIntyre’s work, 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record—1934 is! In fact, the decade of the 30s averaged 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) above normal while the 90s only averaged 0.424 °C (0.763 °F). Six of the ten hottest years occurred before 1955.

Here’s the new Top Ten list (hottest first):

Year	Corrected Temp	Previous hottest year
1934	1.25 °C (2.25 °F)	1998
1998	1.23 °C (2.21 °F)	1934
1921	1.15 °C (2.07 °F)	2006
2006	1.13 °C (2.03 °F)	1921
1931	1.08 °C (1.94 °F)	1931
1999	0.93 °C (1.67 °F)	1999
1953	0.90 °C (1.62 °F)	1953
1990	0.87 °C (1.57 °F)	2001
1938	0.86 °C (1.54 °F)	1990
1939	0.85 °C (1.53 °F)	1938

Note that the temps in the table are not the actual high temperatures for each year (if they were, we’d be talking about global freezing, not warming!). They are the amount in °C (°F) that an average of the temperatures for a particular year was above statistical normal.

Hansen’s error increased temps in the last 20 years by 0.15 °C on average (some stations had errors as high as 1 °C (1.8 °F), others were the same in the negative direction, but the average amounted to an increase of 0.15 °C).

The following graphic is an animation comparing the old GISS temp curve with the corrected curve:

Click on the image to see a larger version. The source images used in the animation came from here.

Once again, the GISS temp data shows how much temperatures were above or below statistical normal. Called "anomalies", the temps that aren’t normal fall between a +1.5 and -1.5 °C (+2.7 and -2.7 °F) band. The red lines show the running 5-year average (or mean) of the anomalies. Notice how the majority of the errors fall conveniently between 1990 and 2000.

Some people are trying to trivialize the change, saying it doesn’t make “much difference”, but as the vaunted Kyoto Protocol is only supposed to reduce temps 0.07 °C by 2050 at a cost of billions of dollars, Steve’s correction is quite an accomplishment.

On his own, Steve McIntyre has reduced temps in the U.S. by 0.15 °C—more than Kyoto ever could!

 

Tags: blog | weblog | global warming | science | climate change | junk science

 

Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite It Was Designed to Connect With

A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target, according to a summary of the investigation released Monday.

Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it.

“The inaccurate perception of its distance and speed … prevented DART from taking effective action to avoid a collision,” the summary said.

Ouch! Read the whole article.

 

Tags: news | blog | weblog | nasa | DART| science |

 

National Geographic reports on yet another breakthrough in alternative fuels:

The End of Oil? Breakthrough Turns Coal Into Clean Diesel

With the price of oil topping a wallet-busting U.S. $70 a barrel yesterday, the search for alternative fuels keeps heating up.

Last week, scientists announced what may be a new end-run around the oil problem: producing diesel fuel from coal, natural gas, and organic material.

Reporting in the current issue of the Journal Science, researchers say they have developed a way to shuffle the carbon atoms derived from cheap fuel sources like coal to form more desirable combinations, such as ethane gas and diesel fuel.

In their study, scientists scrambled the makeup of hydrocarbons—organic compounds found in fossil fuels—using two chemical processes, one of which earned last year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The reaction produced ethane gas and diesel fuel.

The synthetic diesel “is much cleaner burning than conventional diesel, even cleaner burning than gasoline,” said Rutgers University chemist Alan Goldman.

Goldman co-developed the process with Maurice Brookhart, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It’s a very clever idea,” Robert Bergman, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Science in an accompanying news report.

“I don’t think this will be an industrial process tomorrow. But conceptually, it is important.”

Read the whole article.

 

Tags: blog | weblog | opec | politics | oil | energy policy | news

 

A new pyramid has been found in the City of the Gods

Archaeologists working at Teotihuacan, a long-abandoned settlement about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Mexico City, have discovered a huge, 1,500-year-old pyramid in Mexico City, according to this National Geographic article:

“All of us who are working at Teotihuacan are extremely interested [in this discovery],” said Ian Robertson, an anthropologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

“It’s kind of rare to get to look at what Teotihuacanos were doing outside [their] capital city.”

The pyramid on the outskirts of Mexico City measures about 500 feet (152 meters) on each side and stands 60 feet (18 meters) tall. It was discovered beneath a site used today for a popular reenactment of the Crucifixion of Christ during Christianity’s Holy Week, the week before Easter, according to news reports.

The pyramid was carved out on a hillside around A.D. 500 and abandoned around A.D. 800. The Teotihuacan culture collapsed at about the same time.

Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun “the new wonder of the world"?

Halfway around the world, Amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic recently announced that he has uncovered another huge pyramid, this time in Visoko, Bosnia!

If Semir is correct, it would be the first pyramid discovered in Europe.

Yesterday, Osmanagic said he and his team unearthed large, cut stone slabs on a side of the hill that form the outer surface of an ancient pyramid.

Archaeologists and other experts began digging at Visoko last week to unearth a step pyramid covered beneath the 2,120-foot hill known as Visocica.

“These are the first uncovered walls of the pyramid,” Semir Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist said of the stone slabs.

“We can see the surface is perfectly flat. This is the crucial material proof that we are talking pyramids,” he said.

Osmanagic estimates that the structure may have been 722 feet high, possibly a third taller than Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza.

The huge stonework discovered Wednesday appeared to be cut in cubes and polished.

“It is so obvious that the top of the blocks, the surface is man-made,” Osmanagic said.

Earlier research on the hill found that it has 45-degree slopes pointing toward the cardinal points and a flat top. Under layers of dirt, a paved entrance plateau, entrances to tunnels and large stone blocks were discoved.

Satellite photographs and thermal imaging also revealed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visoko Valley.

[Source: Associated Press article via ChinaView

News in Science has more on the story:

On the outskirts of the town, Visocica Hill, which Osmanagic refers to as the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, stands some 220 metres high, with a square base of more than 400 by 400 metres.

Osmanagic says he sees astonishing similarities between the structures and Mexican pyramids dating back to about 200 AD, which also come in pairs, one believed to represent the Sun and the other the Moon.

The excavation work, led by a recently established foundation of local archaeologists and volunteers, will last for 200 days.

The first results would be known in three weeks, Osmanagic says.

The director of the Visoko Historic Heritage museum, Senad Hodovic, says he is no sceptic.

“The pyramids are obviously the work of man. But we need proper and serious analysis to show who built them and when.”

Hodovic says he has spent years urging authorities to support archaeological research on the plateau of the hill, which is recorded in historic annals as the site of a medieval Bosnian town.

He says the shape and monumental size of the structures is not typical for Bosnian constructions of the Middle Ages.

Visoko, a small town that has been slowly dying from economic decline since Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, is hoping what has been dubbed the “the new wonder of the world” will offer it a brighter future.

Pyramid-mania seems to have caught everyone.

Local souvenir shops selling oriental style coffee pots and plates now offer slippers, ceramic coin-boxes, t-shirts and brandy with pyramid logos.

 

Tags: architecture | pyramids | news | science | blog | weblog | teotihuacan | archaeology | life